Health and wealth

Font Size

Print

Feedback

Email

Discuss

: thus depressing income per person. Over time, reduced fertility, more investment and the entrepreneurial benefits of having more people could reverse some of this, but the data suggested that reductions in fertility in particular took a long time.

Researchers at Brown University reached a similar conclusion†. They used estimates of how various health improvements affected different economic variables, such as schooling, and how schooling in turn affected adult wages, in a model of the economy to work out the broader impact of an increase in life expectancy. Their results looked forward and confirmed what Messrs Acemoglu and Johnson had found by looking back: increased population would more than wipe out any productivity benefits of better health. For the first 30 years after an increase in life expectancy from 40 to 60, income per person would be lower than it would have been if life expectancy had not improved.

Hoyt Bleakley of the University of Chicago thinks‡ these results may be too pessimistic. He argues that the Malthusian spectre of diminishing returns as more people crowd on to the same plot of farm land is less relevant in a fast-urbanising developing world, as well as in one more open to trade and capital flows.

Mr Bleakley also argues that focusing on life expectancy may miss the point. Some health improvements may not lead to a longer life, but may nonetheless make people more productive. Hookworm infection, whose eradication from the American South Mr Bleakley has studied, is a case in point. Getting rid of hookworm disease made children quicker learners in school, and increased their incomes when they started working. But it did not increase life expectancy since the infection was not fatal and did not lead to rise in population, which could have prevented individual benefits from carrying over to the economy as a whole. Policies that improve health without affecting the length of life may well be the ones that have a bigger economic pay-off.